Did you watch the Indy 500 on Sunday? Nope, me neither. But I had a good excuse, I was out shooting an entry for the Skinit.com contest. But if you did happen to watch the race on Sunday then maybe you caught the reveal of the winners of Godaddy.com’s first commercial contest. If you didn’t catch the reveal well, I guess it’s a good thing you have the internet. Here they are:

Godaddy has the winning videos posted to their “video.me” site and videos there are stupid hard to embed. So to watch the winning ads, you’ll have to click here: http://videos.godaddy.com/Super-Bowl-Video-Contest

Of the 10 finalists that were announced a few weeks ago, “Go Momma” and the “Get Online Rap” were two of my favorites so I’m glad to see them win. And I’m guessing that marketing nerds across the web were amazed and impressed that godaddy’s top choice was so different that the type of ads they usually put out. To quote Godaddy’s own press release, Go Momma was uncharacteristically “Cleavage-Free.” The ad  has aired a few times on TV so keep your eyes open and you might just catch it.  I bet Godaddy is going to wind up airing it a lot.  As well they should.  I think Go Mamma is easily the best GoDaddy commercial ever because instead of being a confusing, PG-rated strip show, it actually explained what Godaddy.com does!

But the big news isn’t really WHO won this contest…it’s HOW MUCH was won. Here’s a quote from that Godaddy press release I mentioned:

“Five Honorable Mention winners will receive $15,000, raising the prize winnings to $250,000, which makes Go Daddy’s “Create Your Own Commercial” contest the highest guaranteed payout of any commercial contest in advertising history.”

Wow. So apparently, Godaddy was so impressed with their finalists that at the last minute they decided to give 5 other videos “Honorable Mentions” awards of $15,000 each. Wait a second…if there were 3 big winners and 5 honorable mentions, that means 2 finalists didn’t get $15K. Man, sucks to be them! (You can see all the Honorable Mention Winners here.)

And there’s some other news to report; the mystery of why this was called Godaddy.com’s Super Bowl video contest has been solved!  Turns out the contest was announced on Super Bowl Sunday and it was never Godaddy’s intention to actually air the winning ads during the big game.  I follow video contests as closely as pretty much anyone around and I didn’t hear about the godaddy contest until a few days after the superbowl.  So the name of the contest never made much sense.  Why start a “Superbowl” video contest right after the game just ended?  But now that the whole thing is over it’s pretty clear that Godaddy was attempting to out Doritos, Doritos by creating their own, bigger version of the Crash the Superbowl contest.  Maybe next year Godaddy will call their contest “Crash the Indy 500.”  Or maybe not…that pun is only funny until a racer dies in a flaming wreck.

So is Godaddy gearing up to try and overtake Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl contest as THE must-enter video contest of the year?  You know, I certainly hope so.  I sort of think the Crash the Superbowl contest has run its course.  Yeah it gets bigger every year but a video contest that gets 4,000 entries is just out of control.  Godaddy only got about 500 entries but the average quality of those videos BLEW AWAY the average quality of the 2009 Crash the Superbowl entries.  Doritos ads have been done to death and it’d be great to see another company step up and make a grab for the title of the Ultimate User-Generated video contest.  In fact, I’d like to see Godaddy run this contest again this fall and air the winners during the actual Superbowl.  If Doritos does the Crash the Superbowl contest again, it’d make for a great story.  Not only would the media be interested in who won each contest, they’d cover the unofficial contest which would be to see which company would air a better User-Generated ad.